[Mindi]

To tell you the truth, I don't think it's the size of the PMs themselves that is the issue, it's more about the total number of entries in the database that is the issue. They are a relational databse and therefore has to link various different tables and entries together for each PM and that slows down the import significantly.

I mean in theory we could have a more PMs than we have currently if every user had the limit I am imposing, but in reality it was less than 200 people who had more than 100 PMs with the top 10 people on the list taking up almost 20% of the PM database alone. Some people like to save every single PM including things like read receipts and the like at if you're going to be that much of a PM hoarder, you need to copy and paste them to a word document and save them on your own machine.

I was even guilty of saving too many moderation PMs for history's sake and although they are good to keep (so I know the history we've had with certain users), they don't have to be kept in their current form, so I saved them in a document and deleted them from the forum software.